Russian officials were scrambling Tuesday to play down the significance of a ruptured oil pipeline in the country's Arctic region that the U.S. government said could be the worst oil disaster in history.


A U.S. Department of Energy official said Tuesday that the spill ranges between 14,000 and 250,000 barrels of hot, heavy crude oil.


Deputy Energy Secretary Bill White told a press conference in Washington that the spill is bound to wreak havoc in the fragile Arctic environment, Reuters reported.


The oil is flowing through two tributaries of the Pechora River, which flows into the Arctic Ocean, according to The New York Times which first brought the environmental disaster to notice in a front-page article Tuesday.


It said that more than 250,000 tons of hot oil were released near Usinsk, a town in the Komi region of the Arctic, roughly 1,600 kilometers northeast of Moscow, when an earthen dam containing oil flowing from leaky pipelines burst during heavy rains.


The reports were obtained by the Energy Department from American industry officials located in the area.


Should the reports prove accurate, the 250,000-ton total would be eight times the volume of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil disaster, the worst such catastrophe on record.


The New York Times article reported an American energy company official as saying that the source of the spill was a 26-mile stretch of pipeline near Usinsk that had at least seven sizeable holes. The pipeline, the property of the Russian Komineft oil firm, showed signs of being patched at least 27 times, and was surrounded by a 7.5-meter-high dam built to contain the leaking oil.


Russian officials Tuesday acknowledged the incident, but offered dramatically different statistics on the volume of the spill, releasing estimates ranging between 14,000 tons and 60,000 tons, as opposed to The New York Times' stated 250,000 tons.


Komineft spokesperson Tatyana Nikitinskaya, in a statement issued to the Oil Information Agency, said Western news reports describing the incident as an ecological disaster were "more than exaggerated." According to Interfax, Nikitinskaya said that only 14,000 tons of oil had been released during the spill, and none had flowed into the Pechora. However a second Komineft spokesperson, Valery Ilyin, speaking from the Arctic town of Ukhta, said emergency crews had been brought in to remove oil from the water and riverbanks of the Kolva and Usa rivers, both tributaries of the Pechora, The Associated Press reported.


Lisa Speer, an analyst with the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council which monitors the environment, said whatever the figure is, the spill "is very significant," endangering wildlife and food supplies for residents of the area.


"Spills in Arctic environments persist longer than in temperate climates and the impact is longer-term," she added.


Russian Independent Television reported Tuesday night that more than 140 people were involved in the cleanup. The report showed footage of crews working on river banks to remove the spillage, but it gave no independent statistics on the volume, which the station said covered 68 square kilometers.


Sergei Slesarev, a spokesperson for the Russian Fuel and Energy Ministry, called the Western report alarmist, and said the situation was fully under control. "The amount that leaked out was completely insignificant -- just a few drops," he said. "It wasn't even oil that leaked, just sediment mixed with water."


The Russian Environment Ministry offered the highest local estimate of 60,000 tons, Reuters reported. White, showed a film of the burning oil on the river and said the United States had offered to send a team to help in the cleanup.


"There have been discussions between other Russian government officials and a private American firm about obtaining the assistance of an American firm to help remedy the situation," he said.